


Countermoves

by merrymaverick



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, slight sterek - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:20:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26034091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merrymaverick/pseuds/merrymaverick
Summary: Stiles is fairly certain they’ll never know what he’s capable of. What he’d do if he had to.  He’d break his back, shove his leg in a bear trap, lock himself away forever. Whatever it took to keep himself. Everything it took. Some nights, when the air is heavy with the promise of a thunderstorm, too warm for easy sleeping, he thinks through the steps he’d need to take, and tries to not think of the reasons he’d take them.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	Countermoves

Stiles is fairly certain they’ll never know what he’s capable of. What he’s really capable of. What he’d do if he had to. He hopes they’ll never have to find out, but hoping never seems to account for much in the great, ever-tipping supernatural scales of the universe. He’d break his back, shove his leg in a bear trap, lock himself away forever. Whatever it took to keep himself. Everything it took. Some nights, when the air is heavy with the promise of a thunderstorm, too warm for easy sleeping, he thinks through the steps he’d need to take, and tries to not think of the reasons he’d take them.

His father’s gun is locked in the safe downstairs, a little nook in his office, books and old car magazines stacked on top. The code is his mother’s birthday backwards, and his father doesn’t know he knows that. Stiles isn’t even sure when he figured it out himself; could’ve been one of his weekends spent home alone, hyper-focused on results results results, perhaps a product of childhood curiosity and rushed mornings, the Sheriff’s tardiness causing him to forget to change the number before he left for work. But he’s known the code for years now, only using it to sneak a look at passports, nothing more. He was made well aware of the dangers of firearms. It would be hard to get it without his Dad noticing, unless it was really late – he knows all the squeaks on the stairs, but the safe door is loud enough to be heard anywhere in the house. Besides, he might not have the time to make it downstairs.

Pills would be the next thing. In the bathroom the Stilinskis store boxes of Tylenol. Not many, only two or three, most half-empty, but there are four boxes hidden in his room (one in the dresser, in-between shirts, one behind the bookcase, one under his bed and one in his school bag). He figures, if anyone asks questions, if his Dad finds one box of painkillers, it’s only one box in a weird place. Nothing to worry about. Something to raise an eyebrow at, sure. But hey, when you’ve befriended a bunch of super-powered were-people, you get thrown around a fair bit. Besides, most people know about his headaches. And with all the Adderall in the house, in his general direction, really, Tylenol is hardly up there on the list of concerning items.

The issue with pills is that they take a while. And their damage can be undone – not easily, certainly not painlessly, but if someone made him throw up enough, if they got him to hospital in time… Risky, definitely. Worth having as a back up, or even just as front-line defence – if he’s incapacitated in hospital, he can hardly hurt anybody – but a risky, time -consuming endeavour. Not to mention, it’s a lot of pills. And he doesn’t even like taking his Adderall at times, too reminiscent of orange bottles on kitchen counters a lifetime ago, babbling and pleas for no more. If he went that route, he’d have to really push himself. He’d need all the strength he could find.

So there’s a knife under his bed. A box cutter. He used it, once, to make one of those book-safes that were all the rage when he was like, fourteen. He spent days, off and on, carving out a six inch-by-four inch compartment in the middle of an old encyclopaedia, long out of date. He forgot to return it to his Dad’s toolbox, and the Sheriff, in turn, forgot to ask for it back. Before everything, it was rattling around in an old shoe box under his bed. Now it lives in the hollow it carved. Waiting. He doesn’t like to think how he’d use it, doesn’t like to put something so dark into something as dangerously linear as a plan, but his mind races to the endings anyway. It’s bloody, and terrifying, and all too easy, in every version his brain decides to put him through.

Necessary. The part of him that’s damaged beyond repair whispers. Necessary. Prevention. Do what you must before you need to do it. 

The only thing that holds him back is his father’s voice. The look in his eye when he thinks Stiles can’t see. The hope, the pride, the care. The watchfulness. Wary of what has been, of what could be still. The way the Sheriff hovers by his door sometimes, laughing at his jokes, drawing out a conversation and enduring his most ridiculous theories and flailing gestures. The way that Stiles is seventeen, only seventeen, yet it’s clear his Dad needs him as much as he needs his father. 

Stiles knows it would break him, to lose a son (his son, his only son) like that. He knows that there wouldn’t be any kind of life left for his father to carry on with. It’s different when the ones you love are dead, not just gone. It’s different when there’s no sense of them left. If he went away and never came back, his Dad could survive it. It would nearly kill him, but he could live through it. The hope that he might come back, hope that he has a life somewhere, a future, that he could be happy – that would be enough, just enough. But when someone you love is truly, profoundly gone –

Well. They both know what that feels like.

His friends, the pack (a cold voice in his head can’t help but sneer at the word - a pack indeed, of useless half-human children with an inflated sense of their abilities, who only just manage to find the bodies, much less prevent them from piling up) could live through it just fine – he knows it would be hard, would drag Scott through hell and back, damage him for the rest of his life, but he would come back. He would still have a life. Lydia, too, would find it hard to trust again, but would find the way. Derek – he never really knows about Derek. A few trees would probably meet an unfortunate end, but Derek knows loss. Knows it, knows it. Like Stiles, in a way, though a thousand times more twisted and confused, fractured through more death than Stiles thought possible to live through. He would survive, as he always did.

As for the rest, it would be bad, especially after losing one before (he can’t think her name without feeling like he might be sick from all the guilt and confusion and loss, loss, loss because he knew her and she knew him and they were friends, good friends, and now she’s gone because of him) but they could all work it out with a little help from the guidance counsellor. Malia – well, he never really knows what Malia is thinking, even when she seems to say it out loud. It would suck ass for her, he’s pretty sure, especially since it would be the ultimate betrayal for another one who has only lost people. He seems to collect them. But she would survive, because that’s what she does, that’s how she moves through life – if Lydia glides, Malia claws her way out and up and through. Onward.

The only other one left to worry about would be – Melissa. When he thinks of what would happen (which he tries not to, tries to avoid, and it’s only on nights like these, nights still and full of malice, filled with warning of what’s to come), thinks of who would take him, how he’d be found, he thinks of the kind nurse with the sparkling eyes. Of how those eyes would go dark with the news of what he had done. Of how he’d ruin the only mother he’d known, since even before his own mother had died, if he’s honest with himself. In the months before her death, when she’d fallen behind a mask of fear and confusion, it was Melissa that took up the slack. Melissa who’d done laundry, made dinner, wiped tears and kissed knees. Melissa who helped with Biology homework and made him take his meds and wrote notes in his lunchbox even though she didn’t have to, even though he wasn’t her kid and she didn’t need to love him. If anything happened, it would hurt her just as much as if it had been Scott. If anything had to happen, Melissa would be one of the last thoughts Stiles would have. Kind, loving, and there. 

Unlike his father, though, Melissa would have a reason to survive him. She’d have the grit to survive him, too – the same grit that forced her to live through her best friend dying slowly in front of her, that made her protect her son from her husband, that made her put on scrubs every morning and live through the worst realities of humanity. On good days, Stiles likes to think that Melissa’s determination could save even his father, if it came down to it. That she could rescue him as she had before, only this time in the absence of his son rather than because of him. The rest of the time he knows that’s too much for one person to handle. It’s too much to expect from anyone, let alone an overworked single mom dealing with her own loss. 

This kind of thinking, he’s convinced himself, is simply disaster prep. Preparing for the worst is not inviting it to happen, just as it isn’t preventing it from happening at all. Finding a practical solution for a shitty (and maybe inevitable, part of him whispers) situation is a coping strategy, and a rather excellent one at that. Actionable defence for a highly possible attack. Whatever that means. Stiles knows that he is a mere verbal slip, or too-curious wolf, away from being booked therapy for life, or even being thrown in another mental hospital. Institution. Clinic. Whatever. He knows he cannot breathe a word of this to anyone, even though he probably should, even though it definitely isn’t normal or healthy or reasonable in any sense ever. But he also knows that the life he has chosen for himself doesn’t have normal, doesn’t have reason, and isn’t particularly healthy, despite all the running. 

It’s a backup plan. Only a backup plan. Because he can’t go through being possessed again. He can’t risk being used against his friends, against his family, tossed from terror to terror like a rag doll, watching people he loves get hurt and much worse at his hands. He can’t live with more guilt on his conscience, won’t survive another battle of the mind. If he could, he knows he wouldn’t want to. He can sort of understand Isaac now, the way the boy used to drift from leader to leader, uncertain of who he could be, free of his father, yet desperate to cling onto what remained of himself. Now Stiles has the same task of personality reconstruction, the ultimate challenge of self-representation. Someone else played himself, and got away with it. How do you find yourself after that? How can you adapt to a life where your hands caused a massacre, your face the last seen in the eyes of the dead?

The answer, he’s learning, is as simple, and as gut-wrenchingly difficult, as waking up. Day, after day, after day. Waking up and making coffee, taking showers and doing homework. All the little things. Blasting music on the way to school, laughing at Scott’s easily shocked face, worrying about his Dad’s cholesterol levels and watching films he loves with friends who only watch to indulge him. Loving Lydia from a distance, distantly, as he’s always done, as he suspects he always will. Marinating in weird feelings for Derek, and Malia, and not understanding them because that’s what teenagers do and that’s what makes life worth following up on. 

It gets less simple when you factor in the supernatural, and all the lives they try to save, but the underlying logic remains the same. He’s got a lot to lose – that’s how the Nogitsune tricked him in the first place. A lot to lose, and a lot to miss out on if he goes out any other way but old age. Sure, at times those things seem a lot further away, but the pain in the eyes of his father, of Scott, of Melissa – that keeps him from getting any ideas. It keeps him far, far, away from doing anything stupid, he tells himself.

Still. He knows what he’s capable of. He’s brutally aware, even on the best of days, how easily he could do something terrible. He never would, not unless he really, really needed to, but he could. It’s scary to think of, horrible to imagine, but also strangely comforting. If he needs to – and he knows now, knows better than anyone, that anything can, and will, happen – he can do what needs to be done. He will do what no-one but him can do, what no one else will be able to do. It’s not about courage, or sacrifice – it’s purely practical. Logical. And Stiles has always been logical.


End file.
